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C4 Cancelled

Wolf Renztsch has cancelled C4, his popular Apple developer conference, because he feels like he’s lost the fight:

Section 3.3.1 makes developers wholly reliant on Apple for software engineering innovation.

By itself Section 3.3.1 wasn’t enough to cause me to quit C4. I’ve weathered Apple lying to me and their never-ending series of autocratic App Store shenanigans.

But unlike previous issues such as the senseless iPhone SDK NDA, the majority of the community isn’t riled by 3.3.1. On this issue, Apple apologists have the loudest voice. They offer soothing, distracting yet fundamentally irrelevant counterpoints to Apple’s naked power-grab.

With resistance to Section 3.3.1 so scattershot and meek, it’s become clear that I haven’t made the impact I wanted with C4. It’s also clear my interests and the Apple programming community’s interests are farther apart than I had hoped.

On the one hand, I applaud this decision: a lot of us bitch loudly about Apple’s terrible business practices and then do nothing about it¹, but Renztsch is actually putting his money where his mouth is, and making a difficult decision based on nothing more than principle and ideals.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think this is the wrong way to go. C4 seems like a truly independent conference, completely separate from the propaganda swamp of Apple’s own developer events. Killing it is a bold statement, but I wonder if it’s bold enough to actually change anything: it feels like he could do more good by keeping it around, and using it as a platform for his ideals. If you want to convert developers over to your point of view, a well-respected and much-admired Mac conference seems like a really great place to do it.